Lawndale’s most Wated

All photos by Tom Politeo Amy, Brad, and Claire Henderson

By Tom Politeo

From the Southern Sierran March 2003

Three years ago, newly wed Amy and Brad Henderson set out on an ambitious project to plant a native habitat garden in one corner of their yard.
Though they had some idea about the wildlife their small garden might attract, they had no idea it would also attract a truly fearsome beast—city government.

In October of last year the Hendersons were cited for “excessive weeds” during a routine neighborhood inspection by the city of Lawndale. The couple tried to explain that their garden was filled with carefully chosen native plants, not weeds. But the city didn’t buy it. The Hendersons have since retained a lawyer.

Natural history of a yard

In landscaping the garden of their Lawndale home, the Hendersons put their vocations to work. Amy and Brad met in 1994 while students at Cal State University Long Beach in biology and botany. Amy works as a consulting biologist and Brad as a botanist for the California Department of Fish and Game.

The Hendersons started work on their garden by hitting the books. They researched papers written about flora in the Lawndale area nearly 100 years ago, and interviewed people who lived in the area before it was urbanized.

They discovered that their home lies on the eastern edge of the El Segundo sand dune system that extends about two miles to the Pacific Ocean. “The soil is very sandy here,” Brad told a California Native Plant Society group he lectured in February at the South Coast Botanical Gardens. “As soon as you get down to Hawthorne (three blocks east of his house), it turns to adobe.

“I talked to a lot of old timers and some of my relatives,” he added. “Near the house there were vernal pools and spade-footed toads, and to the north, semipermanent and permanent marshes. There could have been a lot of communities meeting here—coastal prairie, dune scrub, and some willows. With that in mind, we tried to design the yard to represent some of the plant communities that were actually in the area.”

Even though their home is on somewhat higher ground, the Hendersons wanted it to be representative of the general area, so they built a small pond to provide habitat like some of the marshes that used to be in the area. The marshes, as well as other plant communities that were once here, were an important part of the Pacific flyway for migratory birds.

The next step in putting together their garden was preparing the grounds, which involved many long hours of pulling out invasive European grasses and plants. Amy did much of this work while carrying their first child. She was still weeding the day before she gave birth two and a half years ago.

Then they began planting. Pictures of their garden in those early stages look just like a rehabitation site, with small flags scattered about the yard to mark the location of the seedlings. Then nature took over, favoring certain species over others. Three years later they have an exemplary native plant garden.

Brad likes to speak of the minimal amount of watering they need to do to support their garden. Though their entire garden is not exclusively comprised of native plants, the exotic plants that border their native plant area are also drought tolerant. Brad says that they can get away with watering as few as two times a year.

Even the small pond that they put in needs very little water in comparison to a lawn, Brad points out. The pond is lined to help keep the water in place, and the cattails that grow around it help shade it and prevent evaporation.
Last year, Brad added a solar-powered pump to help move the pond water. Brad says “the sound of the percolating water has helped attract more birds.” They have seen egrets, Anna’s humming birds, acorn blue butterfly, monarchs, solitary viereo, American kestral, pacific slope flycatcher, air throated flycatcher, black phoebe, nashville warbler, hermit thrush, western scrub jay (nesting), bushtit, house wren, Townsend’s warbler, orange crowned warbler, and many more.

The dormant season

One of the reasons that a garden like the Hendersons’ helps save water is that native plants are adapted to our climate. Unlike plants from more northern climates which are dormant during the winter and grow during the spring and summer, plants native to the drier portions of Southern California have their growing season during winter and early spring and are dormant in the late summer and early fall, before the first rains come.

This growing adaptation helps plants cope with our weather. During our winter and spring when we have ample light, water, and warmth native plants have their growth spurt. Then as the summer gets drier and moves into fall, they go dormant and wait till the next rains to being their growing cycle.

This puts our seasons on a different calendar than the European or even North East notion of gray winters and green summers. In Southern California, winter is more like spring and fall is like winter.
In the fall, before the rains come, our landscape is at its most dormant. The colors of dormancy are faded greens, tans, and browns. Sage brush, which is a vibrant green this time of year, becomes paler as the summer progresses and can take on a very brownish color toward the end of its years. In October or November, the native landscape can look dead to someone who doesn’t understand it.
Code violators?

It is exactly during such a dormant phase that the Hendersons were cited. It is easy to imagine that an inspector would have mistaken the naturally dormant phase of the Hendersons’ carefully planned and maintained garden for a state of neglect. From an ecological viewpoint, the citation is about as silly as citing a homeowner for their trees losing their leaves in the winter.

Originally, the Hendersons had trouble interpreting the citation. They didn’t understand what the city meant by “weeds.” After all, they had just spent the better part of two years removing weeds so they could establish their native plant habitat. When they checked the city code, they found that there was no definition of what “weed” meant.

When asked to specify, city officials pointed to the Hendersons’ garden. The Hendersons thought they might be able to demonstrate to the city that the so-called weeds were native plants and that they served an important role in helping conserve water and protect wildlife.

According to the Hendersons’ attorney, Frank Angel, the city wasn’t receptive to hearing a presentation about their yard. Angel says that when he and the Hendersons were finally to meet with the city, he brought a court reporter along because “my clients have nothing to hide and the city kept changing their story.” He said that city officials were now saying that the issue was never about the native plants, even though they had said so in articles published in the Daily Breeze and aired on KABC.

Angel said that Monica Mendoza, Lawndale’s assistant city planner, said that she would not explain detail by detail what a weed is and what constitutes a lawn being overgrown. He added, “This is symptomatic of a law that is unconstitutionally vague.” Angel adds that the Hendersons are not breaking the law “because you cannot break a law that is unconstitutional.

“What needs to be weeded out there is the ordinance, not the habitat,” Angel adds. “The state policy is to protect habitat, the state Legislature has said so, and the Metropolitan Water District is encouraging that.” Angel explains that the Lawndale ordinance fails to meet constitutional muster for several reasons, including its vagueness and that rather than furthering legitimate state interests it runs contrary to them.

He expressed concern that the city has refused to have a meeting with a public record (that the court reporter would have provided) and instead insisted on meeting in secret. As it turned out, Angel met privately with Lawndale’s city attorney without the Hendersons.

An agreement was drafted at that meeting that would resolve the case and permit the Hendersons to establish a water permeable driveway (city code requires a concrete or asphalt driveway—materials that contribute to urban runoff) and keep their native plant garden. The Hendersons have signed a copy of that agreement, but the city so far has not. Angel adds that the city has added a number of ridiculous stipulations, such as requiring the Hendersons to maintain their yard “in perpetuity.” If the city doesn’t sign the original agreement, the prospect remains that it may take the Hendersons to criminal court.